Drive Home: Word Order, Prepositions, and Verb Forms

Every use of drive home follows the same core frame: a subject drives home a point. Fill the subject with a person or a piece of evidence, and fill the object with the point, message, or risk being emphasized.

With a full noun object, the particle can sit right after the verb or after the object: drive home the point and drive the point home are equally natural. Swap that noun phrase for a pronoun, and only one order survives: drive it home, never drive home it.

Add an audience, and the pattern grows one more piece: drive home to the audience that or how the point applies. The preposition is always to, never for, never dropped.

The past tense is irregular: drove home. Its passive form uses the past participle driven home, which is exactly the pattern for putting the evidence in charge: the risk was driven home by last quarter's numbers.

One frame, four choices: who or what is doing the driving, which word order fits the object, whether an audience needs naming, and whether the sentence is active or passive. Those four choices are the whole system behind drive home.